The present invention deals with a dough cutter. More specifically, the present invention deals with a dough cutter used to make bread products having aesthetically pleasing appearances.
A number of methods have been employed in order to make various types of bread products, such as loaves, buns, rolls, biscuits, and breadsticks, from a sheet of dough. In such systems, a sheet of bread dough may typically be extruded, reduced, and provided to a conveyor which conveys the sheet of dough along a dough travel path. The sheet of dough then encounters one or more cutting apparatus, such as slitter wheels, guillotine-type cutters, reciprocating head cutters, or rotatable drum-type cutters. Such cutters, traditionally, have employed very thin or sharp cutting edges in order to cut the dough. For instance, many such cutting edges are only approximately 1/32 of an inch thick. In fact, conventional wisdom dictates that, when cutting dough, without crimping or performing other types of dough forming functions, the thinner the cutting edge is the better. This requires less cutting pressure and results in less dough displacement from the cut.
However, such cuts can render aesthetically unpleasing dough pieces. For example, rather than resulting in a breadstick or bun which has rounded corners which resemble hand made buns, the cut bun has sharp and squared off edges which can be aesthetically undesirable.
In order to obtain a more rounded look, prior systems have divided or cut the dough sheet with dividers or sharp cutters, as described above, and then subjected the cut dough pieces to a subsequent rolling process by which the dough pieces are rolled to resemble a hand-formed dough piece.
Still other prior techniques do not even attempt to process a dough sheet into such rounded dough pieces. Instead, typical dinner roll making techniques parse dough into dough portions which are placed in molds or rollers which round the dough into balls. Those balls are then baked into the eventual rolls. Also, some bread making techniques parse dough into pieces which are allowed to rest, are sheeted and rolled, subjected to pressure by a pressure board and placed in a pan. Such techniques are quite slow.